


Ever Slowly Dying

by phoenixyfriend



Series: Girl Genius Soulmate AUs [2]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Death, F/M, Ghosts, If you've read the comic you know what that's about, Literally All The Fucked Up Sturmhalten Shit, Soulmate AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 11:04:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17848277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixyfriend/pseuds/phoenixyfriend
Summary: Anevka's dying, and KB's hearing it every step of the way.





	Ever Slowly Dying

**Author's Note:**

> Anonymous asked: Also if you don't mind a second ask from me, 29 for KBnevka? :D :D :D -Timmie
> 
> 29\. the one where your soulmate’s ghost haunts you when they die.

Anevka Sturmvoraus doesn’t believe in soulmates.

She can acknowledge that soul  _connections_  exist. That’s more than obvious, with how commonly recorded postmortem spiritual echoes are. There are even measurements, sometimes.

The mythology around them, however, she rejects.

Then, of course, she dies.

o.o.o.o.o

Klaus Barry Heterodyne grew up in Mechanicsburg, spark-damaged but alive, with prosthetic limbs and a stutter and an ache in his spine where his father hadn’t been able to perfectly match the muscles in his back in time, and the scar tissue was hard and needed to be broken up and buzzed low with pain when the pressure dropped before the storm.

Being alive hurts, but he figures it’s better than being  _dead_ , so. He’s dealing.

“Eat your peas,” Uncle Barry tells him. “Please.”

“But I don’t want to,” KB whines. He’s twenty-one and bored and he hasn’t seen his little sister in  _months_. He’s going to be the Lord Heterodyne as soon as Uncle Barry decides he’s good enough to not need a regent anymore, and he should be allowed to skip his peas.

“KB…” Uncle Barry says, looking so tired that KB feels guilty about it. “Eat your peas.”

“Okay, Uncle Barry,” he mutters. He puts a spoonful of peas into his mouth and tries to ignore the prickling along his back. It’s probably just a–

There’s a distant scream, fuzzy and horrid and KB snaps up straight and looks around in a panic.

“KB?”

“Did you hear that?” He asks. It’s–it’s like the screams he’d heard when Lucrezia had tried to kidnap Agatha again, the time Dad died, with– with the girls in the machine and the–the– “It’s, there was a girl screaming, and I can’t… it wasn’t  _close_ , but it was… I know I heard it, I swear!”

Uncle Barry shakes his head, looking concerned. “No, I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. Castle?”

_**“Nothing, Master Barry.”** _

Barry shakes his head. “Tell me if you hear it again. Finish your dinner. We’ve got to visit the Great Hospital tomorrow.”

KB slouches in a way that hurts, but keeps the scars from stiffening up, and eats his peas.

o.o.o.o.o

 _She is–_ not dead not alive not– _herself, she is Anevka, she is a girl in a machine but she is PerFEct or aT LEasT as CLOsE aS TARvEK COULd MAKE HER SHE IS HERSELF SHE IS ANEVKA THAT’S ALL THAT MATTERS AND ALL THAT WILL EVER MATTER AND SHE IS NOT DEAD SHE ISN’T SHE ISN’T SHE ISN’T SHE_

o.o.o.o.o

KB hears the scream, sometimes. It’s not a memory, it’s  _real_  and it’s  _something only he can hear,_  and it worries him.

He sees something out of the corner of his eye, sometimes. A drifting figure, pale and stumbling and gone as soon as he turns to look closer. He feels them watching him, feels their presence, and it makes him tense up and huddle closer to the safety of the Castle’s walls and the jagerkin.

He has his suspicions of what’s going on, but  _how long does it take one person to die?_

o.o.o.o.o

 _ **She is alive–** SHe ISn’T SHE CAN’t FEeL HERsELF CAnNoT SEE THROugh hER CLANkkkkkkkk’s EyESSSSSSSS CANNOt THInK ThrOUGH THE HAze of PA_IIIIIIIIIIIIINnNnNnN _That surrounds her every thought her every waking breath she cannot see she cannot see she cannot see and the clank is no longer hers to control and the clank is no longer her and she is suffocating in the lonely fear of the darkness that comes to STEaL HER AwAY FOREVeR AND EvER AND EvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVER AND SHE HATES HER FATHER SHE DOES SHE DOES SHE DOES AND SHE IS– **Alive, and that’s really all that matters. She can barely feel the pain of her organic body anymore. Tarvek must have done something to her pain receptors, perhaps a new drug in the life support systems. She’ll have to thank him.**_

o.o.o.o.o

It’s a woman, KB’s sure of it.

She’s wearing a thin dress, and she still disappears when he turns to look at her, but he has a fraction of a second longer before she does.

She’s inching closer to death.

He’s not sure how it’s possible.

It’s been years.

(He’s been telling Uncle Barry, been telling Van and Adam and Lilith and even Agatha. He’s telling them everything he can, just in case it’s not what he thinks it is.)

(Uncle Barry’s  _measured_  it, though. The connection is there, weak but growing stronger, and KB hates it.)

(His soulmate is dying, and he can’t do anything to stop it, and he doesn’t even know who she is.)

She is always, always screaming.

o.o.o.o.o

**_Father’s brought home another girl to put in the machine. Anevka’s been planning with Tarvek for months now, arguably years, and she’s so close to finally putting the bastard in the ground where he belongs. The baron’s man will come, the Geisters will be destroyed, Tarvek can move ahead with becoming Storm King, and Anevka can finally have her revenge._ **

_There is nothing._

_There is nothing._

_There is nothing._

_She is dead._

o.o.o.o.o

“Hi,” KB says, as carefully as he can.

There is color, now. Her hair is redder than blood, even though her body and dress are washed pale and grey. She stares at him, with wide, terrified eyes, and some of the color fills her cheeks. She’s skinny and her face is as hollow as her expression, and there’s an anger below the empty horror.

“I’m Klaus Barry Heterodyne,” he says. “Um. I think you’re my soulmate. You’ve been haunting me for a while now. If… if you need help getting revenge or something, I can look into it? Also, I really wish I could have helped keep you from dying, I could feel it happening, but I don’t know who you are and–”

“Anevka.”

“What?”

“My name is Anevka,” she says. Her voice is hoarse. It’s rough and cracked, and KB can’t tell if it’s from disuse or from screaming. “Princess Anevka Sturmvoraus of Sturmhalten.”

“Okay,” he says. He’s met her, he thinks, but only a few times, polite and distant at functions where Uncle Barry and Prince Aaronev had spoken in frosty tones and then walked away from each other in a huff. He can see the lines of that girl he’d met in her face, when he looks past the fear, the malnutrition, the pain.

“What happened?” KB asks. “If, um, you don’t mind me asking.”

Anevka stares at him for several long minutes. She does not blink.

“You’re my soulmate,” she finally says. “Supposedly.”

“Yes,” KB says. “Supposedly.”

(He wonders about that, sometimes. Lucrezia had been mad, the last time Barry and Baron Wulfenbach had seen her, apparently. Raving about how Bill was haunting her every step and telling her all the ways he was disappointed in her, telling her how terrible she was, telling her she deserved to fail.)

(He wonders about his grandparents and how Teodora had apparently stood over Saturnus’s body and stared into thin air the height of his head and said, “I win. They live, you utter madman. My sons  _live.”)_

(He wonders about how many soulmates have been such terrible curses.)

“My father put me into a machine designed to put a copy of the Other into the head of any who sat in it,” Anevka says. “Your mother, of course. He was rather obsessed with her. I was the variable.”

KB feels his face twitch. “You… you’re his  _daughter_.”

“He hasn’t seen her in twenty years,” Anevka says. Her body is filling in, returning to something she considers more  _normal_  than the failing husk she’d shown up in. Her dress is changing, too. “He’s rather desperate, you see.”

“He… okay,” KB says. He’s going to have to tell Uncle Barry about this. “How did you spent so long dying?”

“My brother built me a prosthetic body. It thinks it’s me. It’s not.”

KB nods, unable to say anything until he finally croaks, “What the  _hell.”_

“She might even be a person,” Anevka says flippantly, waving one hand. “But she’s not me, obviously.”

“Obviously,” KB says faintly. “Right. Okay. I’m going to go talk to Uncle Barry. You’re going to come with me, uh, I mean, you kind of can’t go anywhere else, and… anyway, we’re going to take down your dad. For a lot of reasons. You’re okay with that, right?”

“Let the bastard burn.”

“…right yeah we’re definitely doing this holy  _shit.”_


End file.
